Like most graduates of Northwestern’s online master’s of arts in counseling program, Joe Vegas is buried in debt. 

A Buffalo-based mental health counselor, Vegas graduated in 2019 from Northwestern’s counseling program, having taken out around $189,000 in student debt. Now that he’s five years out of school and fully licensed, he told me, he’s on track to make $62,400 in 2024, which he considers to be a good year.

“We all just laugh,” Vegas told me about when he talks to other Northwestern grads. It’s the only thing they can do. “That’ll never get paid. Ever.”

Fifty-five miles from Northwestern, in an unfashionable west-of-Chicago suburb, lies Aurora University. The scrappy, unassuming institution offers an addiction-focused mental health master’s degree, also mostly online. It’s classified under the same counseling umbrella as Northwestern’s, but it has very different outcomes. Aurora students graduate with an average of $27,588 in debt, around six times less than the median debt of students in Northwestern’s program, $153,657. Five years later, they earn an average annual salary of $76,132, roughly $20,000 more than the $56,897 Northwestern grads bring in.